It's interesting that Political Compass thinks that nearly every political candidate is in the upper right quadrant (the exceptions being Kucinich and Gravel, naturally). Hell, even John Edwards and Barack Obama appear to be moderate conservatives, while Romney and Tancredo would be right at home in fascist parties.
For those who really do want to find out what option they might vote for, I recommend http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html. The questions are actually about policy, and you can easily see the direction in which your answer will push you.

The four-square-mile fossil forest — the largest find ever — is just south of Danville in Vermilion County, Ill., in the 300-million-year-old Herrin coal bed, a 6-foot-thick strip mined by a subsidiary of St. Louis-based Peabody Coal.

rylwin writes: The SpaceX launch scheduled to launch today @ 4pm (PST) was pushed back until 4:45 and then scrubbed with 1 minute left on the countdown. Details should appear on the updates section of the SpaceX site. According to audio heard on the live video feed, the launch will be re-attempted either tomorrow or the next day.

Posted
by
Zonkon Thursday March 15, 2007 @05:25PM
from the i-vote-for-adam-ant dept.

DigitalDame2 writes "Lance Ulanoff of PCMag believes that the Viacom and YouTube lawsuit is a bad idea because it has the potential to damage the burgeoning online video business; instead, it could work with the millions of people who are currently viewing Viacom content on YouTube. On the other side, Jim Louderback, an editor-in-chief of PCMag says that Lance doesn't know what he's talking about: with all the content available online for free, Viacom can kiss those investments goodbye. YouTube is actively filtering, actively allowing uploads, and making money off of the content that's been uploaded. The courts will find that Viacom has been wronged, that Google has not done enough to protect the rights of copyright holders, and that Google owes Viacom reparations. Whose side are you on?"

Posted
by
kdawsonon Thursday March 15, 2007 @11:25AM
from the gods-themselves-contend-in-vain dept.

An anonymous reader alerts us to a murder trial in New Jersey in which Google and MSN searches were used against a woman accused of killing her husband. In the days before the murder, prosecutors say the defendant searched for "How To Commit Murder," "instant poisons," "undetectable poisons," "fatal digoxin doses," and gun laws in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Her husband was killed with a gun procured in Pennsylvania. The crime occurred in 2004; of course, people now know to be careful about their searches.

DanLake writes: "On Tuesday, school officials revealed plans to make available the university's entire 1,800-course curriculum by year's end. Currently, some 1.5 million online independent learners log on the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) site every month and more than 120 universities around the world have inaugurated their own sites for independent learners. MIT has more than 1,500 course curriculums available online to date.

Carson said MIT's teachers collect what they have created for their courses and make it available over the Web. Many online learners purchase text books for the courses they are monitoring and a recent MIT-Amazon link showed that about 2,000 text books were ordered by independent learners, demonstrating just how serious the learners are.

"Video and audio files are very popular," said Carson. "There are 21 courses with full video available." Typically, independent learners view videos with streaming media players and replay them on PCs, MP3s, or iPods."

Riding with Robots writes: "The robotic space probe Cassini has seen lakes of methane on Titan before, but recent close passes by Saturn's giant moon have turned up images of bizzare seas larger than the Great Lakes of North America."

Higher animals use some form of an "internal model" of themselves for planning complex actions and predicting their consequence, but it is not clear if and how these self-models are acquired or what form they take. Analogously, most practical robotic systems use internal mathematical models, but these are laboriously constructed by engineers. While simple yet robust behaviors can be achieved without a model at all, here we show how low-level sensation and actuation synergies can give rise to an internal predictive self-model, which in turn can be used to develop new behaviors.

Parallax Blue writes: "To help celebrate the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, the United States Postal Service will be introducing custom mailboxes wrapped in R2-D2 graphics. It will be interesting to see what measures (or lack thereof) that the USPS takes to prevent these from being stolen the moment they're installed."

Jeian writes: None other than Bill Gates has spoken out against tighter immigration policies in the US. According to Gates, the US is losing skilled immigrants to other countries that are easier to immigrate to. Among his comments: "I personally witness the ill effects of these policies on an almost daily basis at Microsoft."

An anonymous reader writes: GDC 2007: "The Wii is a Piece of Sh*t!", One of Spore's developers rants about Nintendo's "two GameCubes stuck together with duct tape." During a session at GDC this morning titled 'Burning Mad — Game Publishers Rant,' time was taken about half way through to allow developers a chance to spew their own rants. One speaker, Chris Hecker, currently working on Spore at Maxis, took the opportunity to call out Nintendo for not taken games seriously. IGN has the details: http://wii.ign.com/articles/771/771051p1.html

Anonymous Coward writes: "If you read the transcript from today's session, you can see that some (or all) of the Justices are suspicious of software patents.
Item:
Souter compares what MS did to sending a blueprint overseas- which apparently is not infringement:
JUSTICE SOUTER (to ATT): You are saying, I think, in essence if you send a blueprint — this is like a blueprint. It tells, it tells a machine which may be in Europe how to put the object code on other disks or on hard drives. The machine in Europe is following instructions just the way an artisan would follow a blueprint.
Item:
Kennedy accidentally describes (as non-infringing behaviour) the relationship between source code, a compiler and object code! This is really fascinating:
JUSTICE KENNEDY: But suppose, suppose you had a machine that makes another machine, and if you ship that machine to Europe — and there's a patent for the machine that makes it. If you ship it to Europe and it starts making another machine, the statute is not violated; and isn't that just what's happening here?
and Waxman falls all over himself to assert that that is NOT the case....
MR. WAXMAN: No, no, no. This is not a machine tool. The thing that was violated, the machine readable object code, is precisely what is installed on the computer and precisely what is moved from one part of the computer to another in different forms as the computer operates and it continually instructs. This is dynamic. It's not...
and Justice Breyer interrupts him:
JUSTICE BREYER: How would you, how would you — go back for a second, please, because, if you're finished with that, because I don't see how to decide for you without at the same time permitting a person to walk over to the Patent Office, to read that application and the description, which after all at least can be a very highly detailed set of instructions of how to make a machine, getting on the phone, explaining that just like the blueprint which it is just like to somebody in Europe. They then make it. And that on your reading would violate the statute. It can't be right that that would and you don't even think it would.
From this exchange it seems like sending source code to foreign country, which is then compiled down to object code, would have been OK. Object code is what runs- source code is just information to a machine how to make another machine, like a blueprint, at very detailed, as Breyer puts it, blueprint, but still a blueprint.
In the transcript, which is alternatively funny, (because owing to the ridiculous nature of software patents , the lawyers are all but invoking perfect Platonic Ideas to distinguish between object code and software in the abstract) then heartening you can see that the Justices have deep reservations about whether software should or can be patented.
Item:
JUSTICE SCALIA: That, that code is not patentable, you've said.
MR. WAXMAN: The code is not patentable. The expression is copyrightable. AT&T has not sought to get a patent on the code. AT&T has a patent on a system that can be practiced, among other ways, through the use of software.
JUSTICE BREYER: "We're operating under the assumption that software is patentable...but we've never held that in this court, ever, What should we do here?",
This is a fascinating case for a variety of reasons.
1) if MS loses, the follow-on implications for software development in the US are profound. Specifically, MS would no longer be able to export code overseas written here without incurring the wrath of patents filed in the US.
2) if MS loses, the following situation obtains:
A foreign (to the US) student studies cutting edge algorithms in class. Some of those happen to be patented by someone else, like RSA. This is just what graduate students have to do to be any good. The student then leaves the US and seeks employment with a US firm overseas. Can she get a job? Absolutely not. Anything she writes will have been "stolen fruit" in the eyes of the law. Her employer could be subject to charges of infringement over anything she writes. Why Because SHE HERSELF was the means of transmission back to her country. No doubt that is exactly where this goes.
Item:
Justice Breyer asks ATT
if "transmission purely of information" could be prosecuted as a violation.
"I would be quite frightened of deciding for you and discovering vast numbers of inventions that can be thought of in the way you describe this one," he said.
Breyer used the example of someone reading the text of a patent claim over the phone to someone in foreign country who later decided to make the same product, a reading of the law he said "can't be right,".
Of course all this nonsense stems from trying to extend patents into what should be COPYRIGHTED and trade secreted. That's where the problem lies."

dhart writes: "Within only a few days of opening a new customer feedback website, Dell has discovered the feature most requested (by a wide margin!) as an option on all new Dell PCs: Pre-installed Linux. I believe they'll have a harder time now with the tired old mantra "there's no customer demand for Linux"."

soulxtc writes: Never one to let its interests anywhere in the world go unprotected, the FBI and the MPAA have teamed up with the Swedish govt to create an elite corps of Swedish anti-piracy police. In an effort to help stamp out pesky Swedish pirates, FBI agent Andrew Myers and the MPAA have given a group of six Swedish police officers extensive training on how to effectively combat piracy and catch people who engage in illegal downloading from the internet.